How to Run Your First Facebook PPC and How It’s Different From Adwords

Whether or not you’ve been trying to promote your business through Google AdWords, who has nearly become synonymous to PPC, here’s something completely new and different for you to explore. If you think Facebook is only meant for bragging your new dress, checking in to the movie or event and commenting on the pictures of friends and friends of friends, there is a lot more to it than socializing, and it is business marketing and networking.

When it comes to PPC and internet marketing data, Google AdWords and Facebook PPC are running shoulder to shoulder and sometimes it can get difficult to choose the one amongst these two. To know which horse to put your money on, there is a bit of research and comparison to be done. Well, before that, lets understand what Facebook PPC is, how it works and then we’ll see how is it different from the one that’s almost an old school now- Google AdWords.

Facebook PPC Campaign

Just how paid search is synonymous to Google AdWords, Paid and social advertising has become tantamount to Facebook Ads. Have you ever noticed those small, tiny blocks at the right hand side of your Facebook and wondered how you always come across things that totally interest you, things you’ve been looking for, things you at once fall in love with? Don’t consider yourself lucky, it’s the Facebook that does the trick.

There are endless new features and characteristics of Facebook Ads that we must discuss, as we come across them while discussing the process of getting started and running your first Facebook PPC campaign.

You can also take out time to read a post to get started with Instagram ads.

Getting Started

When you want to set up and run a PPC campaign on Facebook, here are some easy steps to follow. You can keep it simple, or go to extreme ends to define the elements and specifications- it’s all up to you. But here’s what and how you go about it.

1. Choosing the Objective

Choose your objective for the campaign. Facebook gives you options such as awareness that includes brand awareness, local awareness and reach, page promotion, boost your post, consideration that means traffic, engagement, app installs, video views and lead generation and conversion that also includes store visits and product catalog sales. Once you define the objective of your campaign, it’s time to move ahead to the next step.

2. Account Creation

Once you define or choose the objective, you can create an ad account for that campaign. Now, you can name or rename your campaign and totally customize it. Choose the account country, currency, and time zone and choose the continue option to reach the next level.

3. Select your Audience

Facebook is really generous when it lets you select your audience with utter specifications. As this is your first Facebook PPC campaign, you can create new audience group, but later, you will be able to save your audience groups for future campaigns and design customized ads for different groups. Now here, you can create custom audiences based on their location, age group, gender and language. This helps you reach the right set of people who might be interested in your product, service or campaign.

Well that’s not all, you can choose detailed targeting to include people who match the chosen demographics, interests, behavior etc and exclude people from the particular location, demographic, interest or behavior. That’s selective and detailed audience targeting.

Next, we have connection type, that lets you choose whether you want to show your Ad to people who like your page or use the app, their friends, or exclude the people who like the page or use the app already, people who use a specific technology or people who respond to a particular event etc. once you save the audience, you can always start a new campaign for that group of audience you created.

4. Placement

Once your ad and its audience is created, it is important to choose where and how to place your ads. You can either put things in the hands of Facebook by choosing automatic placements or choose Edit Placements. While Facebook has an entire department that takes utmost care of Ad placements, it is always safe to put your eggs in their nest just the way cuckoos do.

5. Budget and Scheduling

Now comes the time to disburse some funds or at least decide how much you can invest on your business’ Ad campaign on a social media network that has a 1.86 billion monthly active users. Once you choose your budget and selecting the plan, i.e., daily budget or lifetime budget, and then scheduling your ad display that means selecting continuous display or setting a start and end date and time.

6. Create your Ad

What’s next? Create your ad; choose the format, such as single image, single video, slideshow or canvas, choosing and uploading the images and media files, choosing a scheduler etc to finalize your ad and create it at last.

7. Placement

Well, this one is different. Now you choose your Ad to be displayed on desktop news feed, mobile news feed, feature phone, desktop right column, or instagram feed.

8. Place your Order

Have you been restless for this step? You can finally place your order now, make the payment and wait for an email from Facebook with a confirmation as your Ad goes live. Voila! You did it.